While many are wary of Donald Trump’s next steps as president, others are eagerly anticipating the changes that their chosen candidate has promised them. However, is voting really enough to incite progressive economic change? Joel Magnuson, author of From greed to wellbeing, argues that we must all do much more to bring about real change to society.

Joel Magnuson

Donald Trump’s ascension to the White House does not signify a new beginning or a new era.

Quite the opposite – Trump and his band of reactionaries symbolize the last gasps of a greed-inspired economic system that is crumbling into obsolescence. But like so many instances of imperial decline, this can also signal a time of regeneration. Like the yin and the yang, disintegration and renewal are both aspects of the same process of change. And change we must.

Climate change, financial system instability, and global resource depletion remain the most profound crises of the 21st century, and they cut across all national boundaries and cultural identities. As we look to the future and at our current circumstances, it seems clear that societies everywhere will have no choice but to completely rethink how to address these major problems in our economies. Particularly in the United States.

To mark the timely publication of the ebook of The rise of the right by Simon Winlow, Steve Hall and James Treadwell, we are offering the postscript to the book FREE on our website.

Read the intro here, then click on the link to download.

“We wrote the majority of this book in 2015. Our project was at an end by the time the nation went to the polls in June 2016 to vote on Britain’s continued membership of the European Union.
Roughly 52% of those who voted wanted to bring Britain’s membership to an end. More than 33.5 million people voted in the referendum, and almost 17.5 million people voted to leave.
Most columnists, commentators, pundits and broadcasters – and the enlightened liberals who dominate our academic institutions – were shocked by the result. They just could not understand how and why so many voters had been persuaded by the fearmongering of the Leave campaign. How could voters place their trust in Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and Michael Gove? These men represented the elite, and they were committed to ensuring the continued dominance of capital over human life. Couldn’t people see this? How could so many voters fall for the absurd claims the elite made about the economic benefits of leaving? Didn’t these voters find the Leave campaign’s blatant demonisation of immigrants distasteful? Didn’t they know that the EU generally benefits Britain’s economy, and that a vote to leave the EU was a vote for economic uncertainty and a reduction in living standards for the majority? Continue reading ‘Brexit and working-class politics’

Policy Press author Jessie Daniels on understanding the Trump moment, and what led to it. Originally posted on Racism Review.

Many of us woke up to a November 9 that we never could have imagined. Donald J. Trump, real estate developer and reality TV celebrity, is president-elect of the United States.

Over the last 18 months of his campaign, he has engaged in explicitly racist, anti-Semitic, anti-immigrant, anti-Muslim language that has both shocked and frightened people. The implications of what a Trump presidency could mean for ginning up racial and ethnic hatred are chilling.

Every poll predicted both a Clinton victory and that Democrats would regain control over the Senate. Instead, Donald Trump will be the 45th President of the United States and the Republicans control all branches of government.

Exit interviews reveal some patterns that are instructive. Millennials, of which 55% voted for Clinton, did not turn out to vote in large numbers. 58% of whites, and surprisingly 30% of Latino and Asian voted for Trump. And while Clinton was the ‘break the glass ceiling’ candidate, over 40% of women voted for Trump. Whites without a college degree strongly supported Trump (67%), but so did Whites with a degree (49%), and so did about half of all those earning $50K a year or more. Trump collected about as many votes nationally as did Mitt Romney 4 years earlier. By contrast, Clinton received around 6 million fewer votes than Barack Obama received in 2012.

In the end, this was not an election about who could govern better, so what was this election really about?

The anti-establishment candidate

The answer lies in the primaries, and who garnered what sort of support. Throughout the Republican primaries pundits expected Trump to falter at each stage, and yet he soundly defeated all the logical establishment candidates. Trump was the anti-establishment candidate at a time when the Republican electorate were fed up with their establishment.

“Trump was the anti-establishment candidate at a time when the Republican electorate were fed up with their establishment.”

The US election results have brought out aggression and hostility from supporters of both the right and the left. In particular, the left seems to be contentiously repeating one question:

“Why did so many people feel safer putting their trust in Trump rather than in Clinton? “

Many people are quick to blame racism and bigotry, but there are deeper reasons. Simon Winlow, Steve Hall and James Treadwell, authors of The rise of the right, discuss the ways in which the left has failed to capture the trust of much of the electorate.

Simon Winlow

The mainstream liberal media outlets are outraged. For the liberal commentariat, Trump is the embodiment of all that ails the world. A racist, homophobic and misogynistic billionaire, a climate change denier, a man who apparently inspires loathing throughout the free world, a cocky and self-confident, tax-avoiding bigot whose election suggests the end of progressive liberal multiculturalism and dawning of a new Dark Age.

How could a man such as this win a clear mandate to govern the world’s most powerful nation?

Already our mainstream liberal media elites are asking what it all means. Political activists on the left look crestfallen as they call for a new solidarity in the face of adversity.

Now we need to ask why

Initial analyses tend to suggest that Trump has been voted into office by tens of millions of racist, homophobic and misogynistic white men who are angry about the erasure of their traditional power. Such analyses, fuelled by justifiable ire and shock, offer us only simplistic and predictable cultural reductionism.

What we need are careful empirical and theoretical analyses of the forces that appear set to carry us all into a new era of right-wing nationalism. Why are so many people angry at our established political elites? Why has fear come to play such an important role in the new politics? Why is there such a popular desire to move beyond the established parameters of marketised liberal democracy? What is it that inspires such open hostility towards minorities? These are important questions that demand a clear and objective response shorn of sentimentality and free from the usual academic constraints and injunctions.

“What we see at EDL protests, and what we see with Brexit and the election of Trump, is an inverted and distorted mirror-image of our own ideological failure.”

Age – specifically older age – has been conspicuously absent as a line of personal attack between the candidates, as a demographic target of would-be voters, and as an articulated position regarding health care and pension policies.

Don’t get me wrong. In some respects, I am glad to see that the ageist rhetoric which has clouded other U.S. elections hasn’t appeared this time, at least not explicitly.

Perhaps because the two candidates are so close in age (Trump is 70 years old; Clinton, 68), or because the oldest people in the American baby boomer cohort (those born between 1946 and 1964) are now 70 themselves, we’re not hearing whispers of dementia like in the 2008 election. Then, the 71-year-old John McCain, running against a 47-year-old Barack Obama, was often referred to by contenders and the media as ‘confused’, ‘out of touch’, and lacking vigor and energy.

Of course, chronological age alone says very little about a person or their functional abilities. Although Trump has repeatedly stated that Hilary Clinton ‘doesn’t have the look’ or the ‘stamina’ to be president, it’s unclear if his remarks were based on her gender and a double standard of ‘beauty’, on her age, or something entirely different.

Following his decisive second mandate in less than 12 months, Jeremy Corbyn called on the Labour Party to unite. Without unity the party has no prospect of power. Divided parties always lose elections and the Conservatives have united very quickly after the EU referendum and change of Prime Minister.

Corbyn’s calls for unity seem short-lived, however, with reports of more conflict at the party’s National Executive Committee over the weekend, including the changes that were made at the last minute to Clive Lewis’ speech by Corbyn’s communications chief, Seamus Milne, over the renewal of Trident.

The truce was barely holding up and conference hadn’t even finished!

It is in this context that Rebuilding Social Democracy is published… apparently inauspicious timing, but the need has never been greater.

“Social Democracy is needed in modern Britain and the only adequate vehicle for its implementation is the Labour Party.”